Field of the Invention
Exemplary embodiments of the present invention relate to a controlling device and method of a vehicle camera, and more particularly, to a controlling device and method of a vehicle camera, which is capable of handling a situation in which it is difficult acquire an image due to a wiper operation of the vehicle in case of bad weather.
Description of the Related Art
When a vehicle camera takes images while a wiper is operated due to an external factor such as rain or snow, the quality of the images may be degraded by interference of the wiper operation or the rain or snow in the images.
The operation of the conventional vehicle camera is set in a fixed mode or an automatic mode (exposure, gain and the like) depending on external illuminance. Thus, when the above-described external factor occurs, the performance of a front-view camera system cannot be stably secured.
In particular, when an external factor occurs in the fixed mode, the operation of an intelligent driver assistance system may be limited in a situation where the stability of a driver is required due to the operation of the wiper.
In the automatic mode, the camera may be controlled depending on the external illuminance, and thus provide an image of which the quality is improved more than in the fixed mode. Under the condition where the external illuminance is hardly changed, however, the camera may not properly handle a situation in which an external factor such as the amount of rain or the operation speed of the wiper is changed.
From the above-described point of view, Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication No. H08-72641 has disclosed an image recognizing device for vehicle, which includes an imaging control unit to prevent the reception of image signals during a period of time corresponding to the operation of a wiper, in order to secure the precision of image information. In such an image recognizing device, however, since the imaging control unit prevents the reception of image signals during the period of time corresponding to the operation of the wiper, the input image information is inevitably limited.